For Therese Mills journalist and newspaper magnate on her passing. Reflections. Obituary
As the newspaper as a media form sits at its fin de siecle, the death of Therese Mills resounds with the end of an era.
It forces one to question how adequately has our traditional media been meeting, facing and addressing the challenges of the changing environment of news delivery when one can sit in any corner of the world and command the combined circulation of all of our national newspapers, with just a click while offering personalised customised individualised news.
It is not easy to identify the point of birth of our passions, though it may be easier to identify who or what may have inspired or fed it.
It might have been as a child, from a village, remote and somewhat cut out from the goings on in the capital city and seat of administration and power, waiting to receive the Sunday newspapers – not with any curiosity to know what’s going on in the far off capital, but to pull out the comics section and the children’s supplement that included puzzles, and colouring and drawing challenges, initially, and read the folk stories of mythical characters in the forest around or stories about children from other lands.
Later, the delivery of the Sunday newspaper allowed one to graduate through curiosity to watching pictures – some macabre, some celebratory of national life and international goings-on, a portal to the world; and as one grows older, to read the headlines, and later, to delve into the feature articles, and eventually, news.
That may be said to be the process of awakening to the thing called ‘news’ when news also had the character of the neighbour leaning out her back window to share some snipet of an overnight occurrence that could change the entire character of the day or week in a village.
It may also be the process of awakening of the consciousness of a citizen, and perhaps, too, of a journalist.
That was somewhat my reality.
It may or may not have been the same for Therese Mills (1928-2014)
It may or may not have been the same for Therese Mills (1928-2014) – whose family background was already steeped in national news making, – but it was for me who never had any greater ambition than to read incessantly, and yes, perhaps too, to write – but the latter would come much later.
From a place that I often think of as a place without government, where reading material was scarce, expensive, and hard to come by with the volatility of income of a family that lived off the land, the newspaper was a first source reader.
News, Non Fiction and the Fictional Imagination
Therese was a journalist at the time of my growing into reading news, non fiction.
Reading Therese and the other names in black and white – John, Valentino, Gail, Clevon, Carl, Francis, Horace – their feature stories in particular in our distant village where the authority on anything was my father, the Sheriff! fed my growing into citizen-consciousness, as they were the chroniclers of the (anti) and heroes and heroines of our times.
Author’s note: This impulse in fact fed my fictional imagination and would influence my doctoral thesis that delved into newspapers to trace the budding of the fictional literary conscience of migrant first generations migrant writers and adapted for what has been described as groundbreaking pioneering research in Finding A Place (out of print and now being upgraded for multimedia – Support this initiative. Make contact..
Walking in the footsteps of, Stepping into shoes
Therese was too, a journalist and editor of the Sunday Guardian, at the time of my budding journalism consciousness in the first half-decade of my journalistic life. She was a woman in whose footsteps I walked, stepped into her shoes years later.
In many ways, we had parallel career paths – for the most part inadvertently, more by accident than by design, though it might not seem so.
Driven into journalism only by the wish to write, and an unexpected prompt response to a frenzy of post-high-school job applications by Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Lenn Chongsing, I found myself in the world of that far off place of city journalism and in the ambit of the larger than life energy of Therese Mills.
Not generally known – nor did she present herself – as a nurturer, Therese nurtured the passion to know, and to inform that must be the basic raw materials of every journalist in ways I hardly ever recognised.
She was editor of the Sunday Guardian by the time I was whisked into city journalism after the ‘shortest stint as a stringer, we have ever seen,’ according to my new found colleagues in journalism in South.
Her post that would much later pass to me -about a decade after I was summoned to the Port of Spain desk by – on first impression – the seemingly too-shy-to-be-a-newspaperman, Lenn Chongsing – the then Editor-in-Chief of the Trinidad Guardian newspapers after a couple months as ‘stringer’ at the San Fernando desk that serviced all of “South” Trinidad.
Icons of Caribbean Media reach into village
The Guardian South Bureau was then manned by John Alleyne and Mikey Mahabir both of whom are now deceased. (Find out more on how you can support, sponsor collaborate in the Icons of Global Caribbean Media Museum Initiative make contact
Therese was already in my constitution from reading her, and from liaising with her on the unending list of stories I was uncovering in the South – feeling much like the like-named Chris Columbus must have when he stumbled on our islands or Sir Walter Raleigh on seeing the Pitch Lake for the first time.
Exploring Discovering the Nation
Journalism was a platform for exploring, discovering the nation – as it must have been for the several journalists who preceded me.
Therese like John Alleyne, Mahabir, and Lenn Chongsing and Norris Solomon (also deceased) and Carl Jacobs, John Babb, Arthur Dash and Romeo were unbridled sources of nurturing the curiosity, the enthusiasm and the sense of a refreshing newness and newsiness of it all.
A new world 20th century ‘Kris’ of the post-Columbus world, I began what would become the award-winning series, Discover Trinidad and Tobago, along with others as Teenlife. I did this while holding down the daily news ‘beats’ in education, health, youth, local government, diplomatic news, community and social services while also contributing several articles for each issue of the flagship Sunday edition. Now that’s probably now the combined portfolio of about a dozen reporters today as the trend has been narrowing towards servicing niched desks.
Bliss was it, one might paraphrase Wordsworth,, in that dawning of my journalism career, and heavenly to have such mentors.
A newsroom could be a most stimulating of classrooms for anyone lusting for knowledge.
The Newsroom As University
Under such tutelage, the islands through the lenses of ournalism, became the university I could not yet afford to attend, so by the time I would achieve my doctorate, the first sitting journalist, they say, to do so, I had already accumulated such volumes of research and stories and collections of sometimes intimate details of the lives of famous and not so famous and nondescript nationals and international ones as well – Fidel Castro, the Dalai Lama, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, Naipaul – to fill an encyclopaedia of Caribbean icons. (In Development as the Leaves of Life GloCal Knowledge Pot Digital Archives and Media Museum. If you are interested in Supporting/Sponsoring please make contact.)
The numbers of my mentors could fill several, several more encyclopaedias. I continue to encourage my colleagues to write their memoires – a chore for journalists programmed to and primarily preoccupied with externalising, rather than internalising, chronicling the lives of others, as I am finding out in developing my memoroires, LIFE!HoleHeartedly!
So it was more than well deserved, when the University of the West Indies conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters on Therese, mere months before she died, and just short of her 85th birthday last year – maybe too long in coming but not too late. (Read the satirical Tribute to Swamp Heroism and my picong on the Posthumous Award of an Honorary Doctorate to Calypsonian the Mighty Shadow).
I was just about completing my first degree, when Therese approached me with the plans in progress of starting a new daily newspaper and the offer of being one of its founding journalists.
I had newly returned to the Guardian as a freelancer, from culling skills in television production. as not having a benefactor, helped pay my way through university.
Gnawing newsroom dissatisfaction had prompted my escape before I became embroiled in the bitterness of others – journalism being still to fresh and exciting for me to be so tarnished.
Flashback betwixt and between Newsday and the Guardian
I left the incubator – the ‘old lady of St Vincent Street’ as the Guardian, and indeed Therese herself, was dubbed by ‘the Weeklies’ (the frowned-on proponents of yellow journalism the our pristine white and black variety) to be groomed in television production by another stalwart of national journalism – Dale Kolasingh.
When work involves all your hobbies
Kolasingh thrusted, and entrusted me with, among the gamut of productions of Cross Country, the flagship programme of his newly founded production house, AVM Television. At the same time I wrote and contributed to creation of Survival – an agriculture, agro-industry programme and Booktalk.
Booktalk was a magazine programme that allowed me to wander and wade through the world of books.
It is not work when it all seems a hobby, as much of my journalism career has been. These fed from my literary interest and informed and influence my subsequent interactive productions of LiTTributes and LiTTours, inspired by LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction, derived from my decades of indulgence, research into and associations with world literatures, publishers and authors.
Stepping into Cross Country from Discover Trinidad and Tobago
Cross Country which would also become an award winning series and the first local programme to occupy prime time viewing slot, was, one may say, the audio-visual equivalent of my Discover Trinidad and Tobago column, inclusive of the trials of a transition from being a columnist/writer for print media – where its virtually just you, the writer, your thoughts and your text. If you have the trust and respect of editors and subeditors/copywriters as I received, they rarely tamper with your work without consultation.
Writing for a television was a somewhat different kettle of fish to writing for newspapers, as the writer is a subset of processes that intricately involves engaging with the the vision of producer, director, sponsors, photo and videography, technical editors, librarian, presenter – to name a few.
With Ed Fung and Irma Rambaran as compatriots and Kolasingh, despite keeping a hawkseye on all goings-on, allowing a free reign to conceptualise each segment of the programme, research, identify districts and knowledge sources, and working with an enthused crew, it remained close to media heaven.
Kolasingh, incidentally, also encouraged me to use the prize I had won for social/economic commentary in The BWIA Media Awards for excellence in print journalism for the Discover Trinidad and Tobago series. The prize was an airline ticket to one of the BeeWee’s airline’s destinations – to visit the United Nations office in New York, where he had worked in the communications unit before returning to set up his television production house. I did not know then how he was shaping my future steps into that arena as well.
He set up a guided tour of UN operations for me. It would marker of the surfacing of another passion and vison to change the world.
That was a short digression by way of chronicling and explanation. I returned to freelance with the Guardian as shouldering the intensity of television programme creation would allow little time to focus on my studies as I had just enrolled in the University. My planned hiatus in delaying my studies to work for a year in media had in a flash turned to three years and it was time I reigned in. When I completed my first degree, Therese approached me to join the vision for Newsday.
Newsday – the good news reporter
On the start of Newsday Therese Mills was 65, the age of retirement.
In fact, she had retired from the Guardian for all of three months, when she reincarnated with rejuvenated zeal to head our team that began Newsday.
Ray (Raynier Maharaj, now editor of the Independent in Canada) has a rib-tickling tale of our first encounter – me the flagship journalist, laying down the rules to him, the editor, on how we keep the vision.
My unofficial defacto title would ecome ‘the good news’ reporter of Newsday as Newsday was being billed into existence as ‘the good news’ paper.
…And now for the good news
Newsday’s first lead story was my article headlined ‘5000 Lives Saved’ . It spotlighted the efforts of the national suicide hotline – a strange twist to the news when others chose to focus on the murders and political mayhem of the day. Advertising companies used our slogan ‘….and now for the good news...’ to identify their product with our offerings.
Response to national outcry against crime
Newsday was a response to the national outcry at the pervasive negativity in the existing news environment – not unlike what obtains today – which beggars another question which I’ll address shortly.
For three months we delivered, as our ad stated, on the promise in the initial prospectus reproduced on this page ‘for a new beginning in daily newspapers’…. attempting to make news off good news defy the newsroom adage ‘good news is no news’.
The Good News With our birth, the national atmosphere, as inside Newsday, was much like that Wordsworthian heavenly bliss in the description of the dawn after the smoke of the French Revolution had cleared in Europe; or closer home, like the dawn after the sweeping victory of the National Alliance for Reconstruction in 1986 election. or themore recent elections of 2010.
The awakening of national and social consciousness and conscientiousness, was just as poignant too as it all changed within three months as the story continues!
It begs further reflection on how much a media house is but a chronicler, to merely inform, and how much it can or should attempt to transform the society in which it functions, and what are our place and roles and responsibilities as journalists and the chief protagonists of this tableau….
This represents excerpts from The Media Revolution – Media at the Fin de Siecle
The foregoing memoires form a part of The Global Caribbean Media Museum in development. Drawn from both experience and research of Caribbean media icons as the researcher of media personnel history and heritage. To find out how you may support, sponsor, collaborate, get involved in building the knowledge bank of Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Find out how you may Support Sponsor Collaborate. Let’s Build the Global Caribbean Media Museum together, digitisation of collections. And to develop your own conscious social and corporate media education and outreach for training, course and curriculum development Make contact
Communication Initiative takes up Demokrissy Blog: Gjosts of Journlaism past..
http://www.comminit.com/global/content/ghosts-journalism-past-therese-mills-rip
Media Complaints Council hails Mills
Sunday, January 5 2014
The Media Complaints Council of Trinidad and Tobago (MCC) yesterday expressed condolences to the family, friends and the media fraternity on the passing of Mrs Therese Mills, the Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive of Trinidad and Tobago Newsday Newspaper.
In a release yesterday, the organisation stated that Mills was a woman of immense courage and fortitude.
“She was forthright in defence of media freedom and independence in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider world,” MCC noted, adding that Mills played a pivotal role in the establishment of the MCC in 1997 at a time when there was general public concern for media reform, after the then Government produced a Green Paper on the media.
This paper, among other things, proposed the adoption of statuses that required journalists to report with “due accuracy and impartiality” and proposed the creation of a code of ethics that mandated that journalists promote national unity and economic and social progress.
The release stated, “The Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPBA) saw the need to establish an independent body charged with enforcing a self-adopted Code of Practice.
This body would promote and enforce standards of fair and responsible journalism and protect the independence of journalists by holding them accountable to their colleagues and their profession and not to the government.
“Thus a Code of Practice was adopted and the MCC was created to enforce this Code and to receive and adjudicate on complaints made by members of the public. Ms Mills envisioned that the MCC would help maintain public trust and confidence in the news media by promoting fairness, courtesy and balance and by creating a forum where the public and the news media can engage each other in examining standards of journalistic fairness. She was a pioneer in the field of Caribbean journalism.” http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,188752.html